Jane Fishman: Confessions of a 'gardenist'

I am not a real gardener. But don’t tell that to the group of first- and second-graders from Garrison Elementary School who crossed Boundary Street the other day with their teacher, Debbie Fussell, to see just what was going on in that mishmash of a garden.

I don’t plant in rows. I don’t put in squash. I don’t grow tomatoes. I don’t even tie strings for beans to grow up and around, preferring instead to use some old discarded bedsprings as an anchor.

And after June, when the plants are spent, I don’t pay too much time to what’s going on in the garden. Mostly what I do is dig — to loosen the soil (and see what I can unearth) and to give a wide berth to what is growing.

I’ve got a good team. The gloriosa lily returns every year, even if I’m not there to remind it. The umbrella flat sedge is a laissez-faire kind of plant. The bananas do their own thing.

My most successful crops are the easiest: garlic, turnips, broccoli, collards, sugar snap peas. I think after this year sorrel will take its place in that list of self-starting plants. My friend Denzel, who used to drive a truck for the city and is from Jamaica, dropped off some seeds, and they are going gangbusters.

So a real garden? No.

But talking gardening to 6- and 7-year-olds? I think I’ve found my audience. From their thank-you notes I can see what made the biggest impressions were the plants and trees I do the least to maintain. Still, one young visitor did call me a “good gardenist” (my new favorite word), which I’m going to remember when the borage seeds won’t germinate and my basil seeds don’t show any signs of wanting to pop out.

The loquat trees or Japanese plums are the most self-sufficient. I planted them. But that’s all. I don’t water, fertilize, weed, cajole, encourage or baby them. Yet there they are, four and five stories tall, loaded with fruit.

Same with the mulberries, except those I can’t even take credit for planting. Mulberries are all over Savannah. Someone once thought the leaves could be used to feed silkworms, which could then be used to make silk and, in time, millionaires. It didn’t work out that way. But we do have a lot of mulberry trees, and this year at least we did get some mighty tasty mulberries.

I did make a point to tell my young visitors I don’t have a water source and that the only water I get is what I can collect in a canoe. Which means I have to have some pretty good soil, which means some darn good compost. That they got. This is not the first time they’ve heard about compost.

“I have learned that compost is the smelly opposite of fragrant and it is the vitamins of plants,” someone wrote.

About “pony poop,” which a friend of mine drops off regularly, they’re not so sure because they could not get past the concept and/or the alliteration. They didn’t care that the only things ponies eat — and digest — are grains.

“Stinky,” someone said. “I could do without the pony poop,” a second person wrote. Finally, there was a “P-U” to pony poop. I didn’t even know that expression still existed in the lexicon.

But wait! A dissenter! “My favorite part was you showing us the pony poop.” She continues, “My least favorite part was having to let go of the caterpillar.”

Life is tough.

They understood about banana trees, too.

“I like the big leaf squishy lemony banana tree,” someone wrote. “I didn’t know there is a big puddle in the middle of a banana tree and what I also learned about banana trees are they don’t have a trunk.”

Lots of adults don’t know that.

About 15 years ago ,someone gave me a slip of an angel trumpet, a divine plant with a showy bloom and a luscious smell not unlike the magnolia. It could not be happier in this garden.

The bloom, which comes back every year without any calendar reminders or yellow sticky notes telling them, “It’s time to bloom!” made a big impression on the kids, especially when I said the bloom starts to open at the end of the day and then closes down and dies some 12 hours later. Short but sweet.

“I learned that figs are a fruit and spiderwort is a weed and angel trumpets bloom at night and then they’re done and you can have them to smell (they smell like lemons).”

Someone else said, “The angel trumpets were so pretty I would pay one million dollars for those.”

(I need to remember her name).

Another person, not afraid to admit any gaps in her experience, wrote, “I never really had known that angel trumpets existed!”

A younger student, writing on that softly textured sepia-toned lined paper we all know so well, had another impression. “I felt bad for the angel trumpet,” she printed largely and clearly.

Who needs rows of vegetables when you have squishy banana trees, fragrant angel trumpets and tasty loquats?